Gravitation Fan Fiction ❯ No More 'I Love You' ❯ Chapter 1

I told him not to say that. Never to say I love you. Not to me. Not ever. I do not want that kind of love; not the syrupy, sad, sorry I love yous he ladles on me. They weight me down with memories. Why can't he just let me go?

 

Tohma. He can't let go. It's not in his nature. Sometimes I think he wants to cling to the past. He wants to hold on to it because it connects him to me in a way no one else can understand. Even me. That angry-fear, that hunger-pain, I can't see anything past the feelings- the sting, the blood, the sensation of vomiting up my soul, the emptiness afterward, then the warmth of that voice. It's all my fault. It's all my fault.

 

Maybe it is. Maybe not. Fault is not what keeps me from wanting his love. I am not looking for someone to blame. Tohma assumes I know what I want from the past. I suppose it's because he knows what he wants- me- and he can't see past that. I can't see anything, at all. Maybe I do not want to.

Maybe so.

 

"What are you thinking about, Eiri-boy?" His hand is on my arm. His voice is in my ear. My mind is far away. I stare at the flower pattern on his wallpaper. I am dancing, in my head. Dancing in that garden, somewhere else. "Are you alright?"

 

"Why wouldn't I be?" I wave his chocolate candy offer away. "I'm not in a state of constant relapse, if that's what you're thinking." At least I don't think so. Depression is an odd animal. It can attack from behind. It can jump. It can wait in plain sight. I really don't know if I am. All I know is that I can't see the tiger.

 

"You get so distant, whenever I tell you I love you."

 

"Take a hint." I wish he would.

 

"It hurts, Eiri-boy." He sighs, like spun stardust. "It hurts to love someone so much and get nothing back."

 

Nothing back. That's what I get, when I reach back into myself. Nothing. Just an empty space, where I blew my heart away in New York. Sensei... I wish... "I understand." I say the words out loud, accidentally. Oh.

 

"Do you?" Tohma blinks. I feel his legs shift, I feel the sofa springs creek, I feel the earth tilt, and I am shaking- because all I can find is this nothing. All I can give is this hole in my heart.

 

"I am sorry." I try to get up, this is a mistake. I try- but he catches me. Catches me before I fall. "Let me go." I try to shake him off. But, I can't. Tohma want let me go.

 

"I love you, Eiri-boy." His eyes are dark. Like me. I don't want to find myself in his eyes. I don't want to know what he feels. I don't want to be special to anyone, anymore.

 

"Please don't." I jerk his hand off of me. I fly toward the front door. "I don't want to be loved." I loved once, before.

 

"Then love me." His voice was so far away and sad.

 

"I can't." The door slips open. "I can't..." Not this way. not this kind of love. I slide through the cracks and sleepwalk my way home. Far away from Tohma. As far as I can go.